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Tehran executes Arab-Iranian poet for 'waging war on God'

Washington, Feb. 11 ANI | 1 year ago

Arab-Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani Nejad has been executed on charges including 'waging war on God,' following his apparently coerced confession of being part of an armed Arab terrorist group in a 2011 documentary.

Shaabani was arrested in early 2011 and appeared in a documentary on Iran's Press TV in December that year with three other men making the confession.

According to Huffington Post, despite Shaabani's later statement that he was coerced to make the confession, he was sentenced to death in July 2013 on charges of waging war on god, sowing corruption on earth, producing propaganda against the Islamic Republic and acting against national security.

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC) said that Shaabani was executed in an undisclosed prison alongside Hadi Rashedi, both of whom were members of the Dialogue Institute, an organization in Iran's Khuzestan Province that promotes the understanding of Arabic culture and literature in Iran.

Independent watchdog Freedom House opined that Shaabani's execution showed that despite promises by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani after his 2013 election to fight discrimination of ethnic minorities, violent repression remains government policy, the report added.